Sarah Schulman in Conflict Is Not Abuse. “If conflicted people were expected and encouraged to produce complex understandings of their relationships, then people could be expected to negotiate, instead of having to justify their pain through inflated charges of victimization. And it is in the best interest of us all to try to consciously move to th

It’s just a job. It’s just sitting, waiting, zoning out, and being a piece of a machine, and sometimes I’m too tired and it’s too big and I’m just one piston.

When they introduce me at the UN, it feels more than polite, it feels fictious. The list of compliments. The clapping. I think other people need to believe that I can do good too.

My superpower is I don’t allow myself to feel except for what I’m sure I’m supposed to be feeling.

Scientists say suppressing the expression of an emotion can reduce the feeling itself.[23] In a study published in The Journal of Pain, subjects who were told not to frown experienced less pain than those who grimaced when heat was applied to their arm. However: “People who tend to do this regularly might start to see the world in a more negative l

Fred Moten wrote, “What if we could detach repair not only from restoration but also from the very idea of the original—not so that repair comes first but that it comes before. Then making and repair are inseparable, devoted to one another, suspended between and beside themselves.”[7]

I wonder if the reason why I’ve been saying I’m going to be president all these years is because I want to be treated like someone who might be president one day.

In Michelle Cliff’s “Notes on Speechlessness” she writes, “Speechlessness involves self-denial…to choose to express/to choose to express anger.”[1] I add in the margin: “and for me, to choose to express joy/to choose to feel/to choose to feel pleasure,” because both disappeared when language disappeared. I neglected life-sustaining joy because surv

Wear: a beaded, scalloped necklace on the days you cannot express dissent verbally. (Ruth Bader Ginsburg)[5]